(With thanks to MagicaPractica for taking the time to edit.)
Part 1
The town of Fellmouth, situated on the east coast of Northern England, has a reputation for being one of the most haunted places on the map. This is only to be expected. After all, the residents of the town had spent a lot of time, money and effort selling this side of its history to draw in the crowds. Any visitor to the town barely has time to step from the coach before being bombarded with a bewildering array of spooky, occult activities to choose from including ghost walks, witchcraft museums and alternative shops. In the town's defence, there was certainly enough in its history to justify at least some of this. During the 17th century the craze for witch trials had focused, for a brief time, directly on the sleepy fishing port. The resulting incarcerations and executions of men, women and children had provided enough macabre material for even the most jaded spook hunter and this particular period was heavily referenced in the names of pubs, restaurants and shops. You just couldn't get away from it.
Of course, this was the image that Fellmouth tried to sell to tourists, but it was all a distraction, a front. Keep the punters happy by flogging them tourist guides, crystals and paintings of broomstick-riding hags and just pray to God they never ask about anything real
Fellmouth, more than anything else, was a town of secrets.
There were events in the towns' history that were not recorded in any of the tourist literature or museums. Events that the locals would prefer to be lost and forgotten. Any visitor to the local library would search in vain for the reason why, up until the late nineteenth century, every window in every house had been covered with heavy iron bars, even on the upper floors. The evidence of this could still plainly be seen around many of the windows in town, but it was never commented on. There was also no explanation as to why, while the local church and graveyard were heaving under the weight of organised ghost walks once night fell, there were no such tours to the Blackfell house, a broken-toothed ruin of a building sitting on Hob's Hill, on a barren rise of ground overlooking the sea front. It was a dark, brooding shadow that could be seen from every corner of the town. Any inquiries about it were met with non-commitment shrugs and evasions. Just because you couldn't avoid looking at it, that didn't mean you had to talk about it.
Fellmouth kept its secrets close. To find them, you would have to search for them.
Helen had been in the town for nearly three months and she was only now getting a sense of something dark hiding beneath the fake, gothic facade. Nothing more than a faint odour but enough to intrigue and excite, even if she couldn't actually name it. She had known within weeks of arriving in the town that she had made the right decision to come.
It had been an easy choice after being made redundant from her research job at a bargain basement television company specialising in "true" stories of the supernatural. The speech marks around the world "true" were so large they could have encompassed the moon. In Helen's experience, her employers would take the testimony of even the most obvious charlatan or lunatic, slap an eerie soundtrack over the top and broadcast it as "incontrovertible evidence of the other world." Not that her employers believed any of this shite, of course, but it was cheap to produce and always found a buyer. It was a compromised career and, looking back now that it was over, she was disgusted with herself for sticking with it for so long. She had clashed with, pretty much, every member of staff and had found the work itself uninspiring and repetitive.
She would be the first to admit that she hadn't made it easy for herself. She had the tendency to be abrasive and she had little patience for the polite niceties that working in a team required. Above all, she hated anything artificial or fake, not a character trait that endeared her to others in an industry built on artifice. She had worked there for nearly six years and had welcomed the announcement of her redundancy as an act of long-delayed mercy, a sharp kick up the arse booting her out of the rut she'd been stuck in since leaving university. It did still grate that the decision to leave had not been her own. Ideally, she would have liked to have gone out in a blaze of glory, telling them all where to shove their dowsing rods and Ouija boards, but the important thing was she was out.
Of course, once she had gained, or rather been granted, her freedom she now had to work out what the hell she was going to do with it. Whatever it was, it needed to be herself alone. She had no desire to be an employee again. She had always planned to write at some point, and she now found she no longer had any excuse not to at least give it a try. Her redundancy pay out was fairly pitiful but, considering the industry she was in, and the penny-pinching nature of her employers, she was lucky to have walked away with anything other than what she could pinch from the stationary cupboard. Meagre as it was, it was enough for her to finally act on an idea that had been percolating for some time: an expose on the ghost industry. And where better to start than with Fellmouth? It was, if not the Disneyland, then certainly the off-season Blackpool for witch hunters. She had no family, her last relationship had fizzled out in a stale blaze of mediocrity six months before and, although she had a number of people she classed as close friends, she had never been the sort of person who needed to speak to them every day.
She had used her pay-out, along with her savings, to move into a seafront cottage not far from the town's south pier. Her original plan had been to find work in one of the local bars or restaurants in the town. However, she quickly found that, although the locals were more than willing to welcome visitors who were staying for a few weeks tops, they were less accepting of strangers who rented out a cottage on a six month lease and appeared to be attempting to lay down roots.
Her appearance counted against her, as she always expected it would. She was in her early thirties, attractive, if a little intimidating, with long blonde hair spilling out untidily past her shoulders. She had an artistic air about her, and her clothing had something of the gothic about it, although she resisted any such labels. What really stood out about her, however, were her tattoos. She had spent the entirety of her twenties at work on an entirely personal artistic project . . . herself.
The centrepiece was hidden by her clothing, and she was justifiably proud of it. The dark shape of a bare hawthorn tree rose up from the left side of her lower back, it's roots stretching down like fingers over the swell of her bottom. It's trunk curved over across her spine before sweeping back, it's dark, thorny branches flowing over her left shoulder to gather, in a black, barbed tangle at her chest. She had been inspired after visiting an art gallery in Manchester. Amongst all the surrealism, portraits and impenetrable sculptures, she had been drawn to a winter landscape photograph of a skeletal hawthorn tree standing alone on a rise of ground overlooking frosted moorland. The image had managed to be both bleak and breathtakingly beautiful; The tree an image of independence, resilience and a dark, desolate beauty. It appealed to her own nature and those of her friends who knew her best regarded it as nothing less than a accurate portrait of her.
Her arms too were covered in long, black designs that snaked down to the backs of her hands. Most people could not see the full extent of the design, of course, but they saw enough to intrigue them.
At first, after moving to Fellmouth, she had covered up these designs, assuming that the average local would be far too conservative and reserved to appreciate them. As it turned out though, many people had been fascinated by them, and she quickly put away the long sleeved shirts and jumpers, in favour of her usual choice of t-shirts and scoop-neck tops. She attracted the attention of more than a few of the local men, not something she necessarily objected too, but certainly not something she encouraged. She was here to work, after all and it would be silly to add unnecessary complications. Besides, as fascinated as the townspeople were, they did not want her serving bar, or waiting tables. And so she had needed to look elsewhere, finally picking up a few shifts at a small restaurant in the next village.
When it came to her real work, as she liked to call it, initially she had been frustrated to find that she could make no headway at all. The locals had their tired, cliched spook stories and they were sticking to them. It was only when she accessed the local library that she began to catch glimpses of the real history of the town, hidden below. Although her initial plan had been to write an expose of the ways in which the town had spent the last few decades milking the gullible of all their hard earned cash, she began to become aware of another, possibly more interesting story hidden behind the plastic skeleton masks.
What first sparked her curiosity was an absence, a void in the historical records that seemed to centre on the old ruin she could see every morning from her kitchen window. It wasn't that she had found anything of interest amongst the dusty archives lining the basement of the old, blackstone library building, it was that she hadn't. Despite spending every day ploughing though the records, she could find not a single reference to the Blackfell House. Nothing at all.
